Open charm tomography of cold nuclear matter

Abstract

We study the relative contribution of partonic sub-processes to D meson production and D meson-triggered inclusive di-hadrons to lowest order in perturbative QCD. While gluon fusion dominates the creation of large angle DD-bar pairs, charm on light parton scattering determines the yield of single inclusive D mesons. The distinctly different non-perturbative fragmentation of c quarks into D mesons versus the fragmentation of quarks and gluons into light hadrons results in a strong transverse momentum dependence of anticharm content of the away-side charm-triggered jet. In p+A reactions, we calculate and resum the coherent nuclear-enhanced power corrections from the final state partonic scattering in the medium. We find that single and double inclusive open charm production can be suppressed as much as the yield of neutral pions from dynamical high-twist shadowing. Effects of energy loss in p+A collisions are also investigated phenomenologically and may lead to significantly weaker transverse momentum dependence of the nuclear attenuation.

24 pages, 21 figures

References in corpus (1)

• Azimuthal Angle Correlations for Rapidity Separated Hadron Pairs in d+Au Collisions at sqrt(s_NN) = 200 GeV

Cited by in corpus (10)

• Heavy-Quark Kinetics in the QGP at LHC
• Thermal Dileptons at LHC
• A light-cone wavefunction approach to open heavy flavor dynamics in QCD matter
• Non-Abelian energy loss in cold nuclear matter
• Collisional dissociation of heavy mesons in dense QCD matter
• A theory of jet shapes and cross sections: from hadrons to nuclei
• Single transverse-spin asymmetry for $D$-meson production in semi-inclusive deep inelastic scattering
• Formation and decay of hadronic resonances in the QGP
• Final state interactions and hadron quenching in cold nuclear matter
• The conical flow from quenched jets in sQGP